I haven't seen the update yet to try it, but am hoping I do soon. This is long, long overdue.
All this said - Hangouts on desktop is still so much worse than GChat was - and GChat had free calls too. I'd type a number, two seconds later it would be ringing in the bottom right corner. Now, a Hangout window opens, the Hangouts plugin loads, my CPU goes haywire...
I stand 100% behind your statement. I can't stand to use Hangouts. I remember when you could simply have a video chat plugin installed in Google Chat with HD feature enabled in labs and CPU usage wouldn't be a quarter what a video chat in Hangouts is now. I dream that they still had the option to use the older video chat functionality.
And it is it holistically proprietary inoperable bullshit now. Your messages still get broadcast through their XMPP infrastructure (for now) so I can still use Telepathy with their services, but the UX is shit because Jingle broke amongst other things.
I end up missing incoming calls because of this - it takes 3-5 seconds for the call to be answered from when I click the accept button. It was much better before.
Somewhat hilariously this change stops any of the text messages from reaching the google voice web app in favor of hangouts (the web app being basically it's only redeeming quality at this point) and there appears to be some weird behavior when texting people through hangouts.
The webapp was the only reason I still bothered to use GV since it's felt like it's been abandoned for years now. It's frustrating how great this could have been especially with how early it originally came out, but I don't think it's worth it anymore - still no MMS (therefore no groupchat support). No notice of any of those failing either.
People are better off just using iMessage even though it isn't cross platform than dealing with this.
The two benefits I can still think of are that it's easy to switch carriers/numbers since your GV number is an abstraction and if you're out of the country temporarily you can still get texts to your American GV number. Really though FB/Whatsapp and a billion other widely used chat solutions have solved this and people in the US don't switch networks/numbers that often.
According to that thread this update breaks GV functionality (texting from GV website and texting from Hangouts). Seeing as texting from the webapp is the only reason I even have GV, looks like i'll be ditching that number once they kick everyone off GV for good.
This [1] seems to indicate that incoming Google Voice sms messages will appear in hangouts, but I'm not seeing it - can anyone confirm that this is the case? I don't see any settings that would affect this either.
Why has Google had such a miserable time implementing a usable voice calling service? It's seems relatively straightforward (on the front-end, at least) and yet we have a stream of poorly conceived offerings.
And what a stupid name for a core communications platform.
Worse, to receive calls via Hangouts (web browser) you have to join Google+ which is complete b.s. If there's anything worse than Hangouts it's Google+. At least Hangouts is slowly getting better.
This has been available on iOS for a long time, which I found to be really, really strange, given that you would think Android would be the platform where they'd want to put their more advanced features.
It isn't half bad, though -- the call quality, even when the call terminates in an actual phone number, exceeds that of cellular by a good margin, due to what I assume is a much better bitrate being used. And it works even if you don't have a Google Voice account. This is nice, because I can fire it up and make a phone call to a customer (I work for an MSP) without giving away my cell phone number. This is important to me because if all my customers had my cell number, I'd have to change it constantly or never have peace.
edit BTW, some pitfalls of this I have discovered. Depending on how well your cell handles handoffs between Wifi and LTE, your call may be dropped as you walk away from a Wifi hotspot. It works over 3G, but not well. The ringer for Hangouts on iOS is almost impossible to notice, so if you get an incoming GV call, good luck with that. I have had a good number of randomly dropped calls that I could not trace back to a cause. If you get an incoming REAL phone call on your real phone number, Hangouts (at least on iOS) immediately boots you out of your Hangouts call, even if the Hangouts call is on Wifi. (With Verizon, voice call kills LTE data stream, so this is to be expected, but with Wifi... not to be expected.)
Are we to assume that with this update, we can finally get rid of the old "Google Voice" app to do text messaging and playback voicemail?
For my use case, I ditched my iPhone 4S last year and got a Retina iPad mini with a prepaid Verizon data plan. It's pretty good, though there needs to be better integration between Hangouts and iOS. For example, if I get an incoming call notification, it sometimes will not automatically open Hangouts to receive the call. It would take me to the Home screen, then I have to open Hangouts in hopes that I can answer the call in time. If iPad's locked, then I have to act fast to enter the passcode and launch Hangouts manually.
This many not really be a problem with Hangouts than it is that iOS doesn't support deep integration with 3rd party telephony, so that the experience is no different from receiving a native phone call on an iPhone. Other small complaints are that the push notification (incoming call) sound persists for a few seconds after the call's connected, and that it only shows me the phone number of the incoming call and doesn't display the contact's name if it's in my contacts.
Considering I don't use the phone much, and have saved a lot of money by not subscribing to a smartphone plan, this overall was a good experiment. But I'll be going back to an iPhone soon because it's been a burden carrying an iPad everywhere for the past year. With Wi-fi calling now available in iOS8, I'll probably try out T-Mobile's test drive and if the coverage is good enough in my area, will probably sign up for it since they have the cheapest plans.
Voice calls via hangouts has been possible on android this whole time too. Just start a video call, then turn off video and speaker. This should have been a trivial addition years ago. I can only assume it was omitted for some business reason.
Until Hangouts provide the ability to properly control one's visibility, I Will. Not. Use. Them. Full. Stop.
It's somewhat amusing to see Google finally reintroducing functionality which worked perfectly well in GChat years ago. But sad when I reflect on how I now spend so much less time using the Google ecosystem, thanks to their constant dismantling (Reader), deprecation (GChat), divestment (Sketchup), and defacing (Gmail/maps UX/UI) of software which I once relied upon. Google is still doing many things right; why are they consistently getting certain things so wrong?
Fine, but I wish they'd stop breaking some of the core features in hangouts. Since fairly recently, non google users are unable to get into video hangouts via new-style (non /_/calendar/) google calendar created links. Uberconference integration doesn't consistently work. Screenshare (since the plugin was phased out) doesn't work in chromium/ubuntu, but does in firefox. I've reported all of these issues in the product forums, but haven't seen resolution on any of them.
I know google isn't "into QA", but for such a core product it's remarkably flaky.
Maybe it's just me, but I've had this functionality on the iOS version of Hangouts for a while (I already have Google Voice). Outgoing phone calls from Hangouts show my GV number as caller ID. Incoming calls also ring on my Hangouts app. I did not know that that wasn't available for Android users...
Anyway, it's very handy. I have a US Google Voice account, but live abroad. Calls from hangouts are the primary way I talk to my friends and family back home. Wifi or a very strong 4G signal is required, 3G doesn't really cut it.
Didn't this used to work fine with Google Voice and Google Chat? Then they broke it, and now it's fixed?
Lately, Google Hangouts has been giving me abysmal results when talking to my parents in the US. The video freezes every minute or so, and even voice only doesn't work so well. It used to work much better.
The Google Voice app still did a traditional cellular call to my knowledge. You had to get a third party app like GrooVe IP in order to make a data call via the Google Voice system.
Shameless plug: if anyone is interested in helping a startup test out their VoIP infrastructure, let me know (email in profile) and I'll hook you up with a free SIP trunk you can use for a while for both domestic and international calls. Conversational traffic only please, no automated dialers of any kind. To be used with any SIP client of your choice.
"it’s free to call numbers in the U.S. and Canada"
It's great that expensive international calls are a thing of the past by now but is this really the right way to go? I'm in the UK - do I have to pay international rates to call UK numbers or will I just not be able to call from the UK 'yet'?
Free in price perhaps, but I'm not sure how readily I'm going to start using this. Call me paranoid but voice calls are probably the one part of my life right now that Google don't have access to. I just don't know how I feel about handing another piece of information over to them. It's not even that it's Google - I'd say the same thing for any other corporation trying this. I removed Facebook from my phone for this very reason. Just makes me feel that little bit uneasy.
It's really sad that Google took all that direction with Hangouts.
Now requesting any bug fixes for federated Google Talk is just pointless. Google completely ignores them under excuse that "Hangouts is the way now".
For example there is no hope they'll fix server to server encryption which they don't provide in Google Talk federation, which cut off all contacts from there since a lot of servers now make such encryption mandatory.
Finally. Now when I'm in my basement I can at least wifi-call my family from my cellphone instead of having to open up my damn laptop to call from a Chrome gmail browser tab.
I wish Google would take a second to try their own iOS dialer in real-life scenarios:
1) Paste an international number like +34 911 111 111 from the web to Hangouts: it gets pasted as 34911111111, losing the +
2) They don't follow the standard text input element, so it's not possible to go to the beginning of the line and add a +
3) ... now you're stuck with app switching and TYPING NUMBERS IN, NUMBER BY NUMBER
There's that and then there's the horrible Hangouts video chat experience. I can't count how many hours I've wasted trying to explain other people how to join a call or share their screen before giving up and doing a voice call or skype.
Beware to everyone setting incoming Voice calls to ring in Hangouts. YOU NEED TO DISABLE THIS FEATURE IN VOICE AT THE SAME TIME, or your phone will ring in two different apps, and continue ringing in the second one even after you answer the call in the first one (no matter whether that's the Android Phone app or Hangouts). This embarrassed me on a business call today.
I can install the dialer, but can't seem to find the 2.3 upgrade from 2.1.2. You'd think this would work on a Nexus 4.
EDIT "To get started on Android, just grab the new version of Hangouts (v2.3, rolling out over the next few days),"
Why release the dialer in the play store if it requires a yet to be released updated hangouts version?
Why are we paying for ginormously expensive cell phone bills again? With a wifi connection, you can now:
Talk
Text
Send MMS (think Snapchat)
Do everything else smartphone-wise.
I know a few things that might run into issues - you can't take a call while on the road without cell service. GPS would be a no-go. Things like Google Maps and Nike Running wouldn't work.
But aside from that.... what good reasons still exist for having a cell phone bill?
Well, this took a while. It's been the most frustrating experience having Hangouts since it rolled out, because of this exact issue: I based everything on GrooveIP at the time, having a small voice plan but unlimited data. Then Hangouts showed up and everything became messy (I still hate hangouts, putting SMS and web chat at the same place is very confusing for the average user)
I tried to look at the details but couldn't find out, so may be someone has the answer. Do I need to have a google+ account to use hangout or my gmail address is fine ? I just don't want a g+ account and don't want to be tricked into creating one by mistake.
I'm not sure I understand why you don't want your account to have a private G+ page. Why would you miss out on a service you like because you don't want to have to not use another one?
[+] [-] untog|11 years ago|reply
I haven't seen the update yet to try it, but am hoping I do soon. This is long, long overdue.
All this said - Hangouts on desktop is still so much worse than GChat was - and GChat had free calls too. I'd type a number, two seconds later it would be ringing in the bottom right corner. Now, a Hangout window opens, the Hangouts plugin loads, my CPU goes haywire...
[+] [-] cantbecool|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zanny|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xur17|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gonehome|11 years ago|reply
The webapp was the only reason I still bothered to use GV since it's felt like it's been abandoned for years now. It's frustrating how great this could have been especially with how early it originally came out, but I don't think it's worth it anymore - still no MMS (therefore no groupchat support). No notice of any of those failing either.
People are better off just using iMessage even though it isn't cross platform than dealing with this.
The two benefits I can still think of are that it's easy to switch carriers/numbers since your GV number is an abstraction and if you're out of the country temporarily you can still get texts to your American GV number. Really though FB/Whatsapp and a billion other widely used chat solutions have solved this and people in the US don't switch networks/numbers that often.
[+] [-] pouzy|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] driverdan|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vlunkr|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] peterwwillis|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rush-tea|11 years ago|reply
i embrace this change so now i can make call using my Nexus 7. awesome. it's like having another phone.
[+] [-] xur17|11 years ago|reply
[1] http://techcrunch.com/2014/09/10/google-hangouts-gets-deep-g...
[+] [-] ComputerGuru|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pbreit|11 years ago|reply
And what a stupid name for a core communications platform.
[+] [-] taigeair|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cmurf|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chakalakasp|11 years ago|reply
It isn't half bad, though -- the call quality, even when the call terminates in an actual phone number, exceeds that of cellular by a good margin, due to what I assume is a much better bitrate being used. And it works even if you don't have a Google Voice account. This is nice, because I can fire it up and make a phone call to a customer (I work for an MSP) without giving away my cell phone number. This is important to me because if all my customers had my cell number, I'd have to change it constantly or never have peace.
edit BTW, some pitfalls of this I have discovered. Depending on how well your cell handles handoffs between Wifi and LTE, your call may be dropped as you walk away from a Wifi hotspot. It works over 3G, but not well. The ringer for Hangouts on iOS is almost impossible to notice, so if you get an incoming GV call, good luck with that. I have had a good number of randomly dropped calls that I could not trace back to a cause. If you get an incoming REAL phone call on your real phone number, Hangouts (at least on iOS) immediately boots you out of your Hangouts call, even if the Hangouts call is on Wifi. (With Verizon, voice call kills LTE data stream, so this is to be expected, but with Wifi... not to be expected.)
[+] [-] milhous|11 years ago|reply
For my use case, I ditched my iPhone 4S last year and got a Retina iPad mini with a prepaid Verizon data plan. It's pretty good, though there needs to be better integration between Hangouts and iOS. For example, if I get an incoming call notification, it sometimes will not automatically open Hangouts to receive the call. It would take me to the Home screen, then I have to open Hangouts in hopes that I can answer the call in time. If iPad's locked, then I have to act fast to enter the passcode and launch Hangouts manually.
This many not really be a problem with Hangouts than it is that iOS doesn't support deep integration with 3rd party telephony, so that the experience is no different from receiving a native phone call on an iPhone. Other small complaints are that the push notification (incoming call) sound persists for a few seconds after the call's connected, and that it only shows me the phone number of the incoming call and doesn't display the contact's name if it's in my contacts.
Considering I don't use the phone much, and have saved a lot of money by not subscribing to a smartphone plan, this overall was a good experiment. But I'll be going back to an iPhone soon because it's been a burden carrying an iPad everywhere for the past year. With Wi-fi calling now available in iOS8, I'll probably try out T-Mobile's test drive and if the coverage is good enough in my area, will probably sign up for it since they have the cheapest plans.
[+] [-] tootie|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RachelF|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jsnk|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nkoren|11 years ago|reply
It's somewhat amusing to see Google finally reintroducing functionality which worked perfectly well in GChat years ago. But sad when I reflect on how I now spend so much less time using the Google ecosystem, thanks to their constant dismantling (Reader), deprecation (GChat), divestment (Sketchup), and defacing (Gmail/maps UX/UI) of software which I once relied upon. Google is still doing many things right; why are they consistently getting certain things so wrong?
[+] [-] chris_va|11 years ago|reply
Edit: To folks down voting... That is totally fair, this was a useless negative comment on my part.
Regardless, it seems unnecessary to avoid using a product that it might get changed.
[+] [-] flavor8|11 years ago|reply
I know google isn't "into QA", but for such a core product it's remarkably flaky.
[+] [-] silverbax88|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] furyg3|11 years ago|reply
Anyway, it's very handy. I have a US Google Voice account, but live abroad. Calls from hangouts are the primary way I talk to my friends and family back home. Wifi or a very strong 4G signal is required, 3G doesn't really cut it.
[+] [-] davidw|11 years ago|reply
Lately, Google Hangouts has been giving me abysmal results when talking to my parents in the US. The video freezes every minute or so, and even voice only doesn't work so well. It used to work much better.
[+] [-] xhrpost|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] darkstar999|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] on_and_off|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kilovoltaire|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] toomuchtodo|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aviv|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] namtab00|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mcintyre1994|11 years ago|reply
It's great that expensive international calls are a thing of the past by now but is this really the right way to go? I'm in the UK - do I have to pay international rates to call UK numbers or will I just not be able to call from the UK 'yet'?
[+] [-] gchp|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shmerl|11 years ago|reply
Now requesting any bug fixes for federated Google Talk is just pointless. Google completely ignores them under excuse that "Hangouts is the way now".
For example there is no hope they'll fix server to server encryption which they don't provide in Google Talk federation, which cut off all contacts from there since a lot of servers now make such encryption mandatory.
[+] [-] AdmiralAsshat|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] michokest|11 years ago|reply
1) Paste an international number like +34 911 111 111 from the web to Hangouts: it gets pasted as 34911111111, losing the +
2) They don't follow the standard text input element, so it's not possible to go to the beginning of the line and add a +
3) ... now you're stuck with app switching and TYPING NUMBERS IN, NUMBER BY NUMBER
There's that and then there's the horrible Hangouts video chat experience. I can't count how many hours I've wasted trying to explain other people how to join a call or share their screen before giving up and doing a voice call or skype.
[+] [-] wiredfool|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wiredfool|11 years ago|reply
[edit -- it appears that I still haven't been gifted with the new Hangouts.]
[+] [-] eitally|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ErikRogneby|11 years ago|reply
Why release the dialer in the play store if it requires a yet to be released updated hangouts version?
[+] [-] eitally|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] abcdefidk|11 years ago|reply
Why are we paying for ginormously expensive cell phone bills again? With a wifi connection, you can now:
Talk
Text
Send MMS (think Snapchat)
Do everything else smartphone-wise.
I know a few things that might run into issues - you can't take a call while on the road without cell service. GPS would be a no-go. Things like Google Maps and Nike Running wouldn't work.
But aside from that.... what good reasons still exist for having a cell phone bill?
[+] [-] pouzy|11 years ago|reply
I wrote this a bit more that a year ago about how all of Google's products are becoming too complicated: http://oneurl.me/google-my-mom-cant-use-your-new-products
This is all linked to the Google+ spirit: Trying to make things work when they clearly don't.
The GV/hangouts app hasn't been rolled out on my phone yet, but I'm looking forward to see what complications it creates :)
[+] [-] smeyer|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gk1|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] duked|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] esteth|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] driverdan|11 years ago|reply